The Perfect Ending
by caitlinalicia
Summary: [ Post RENT ]. Mark will burn more than just the past to the ground, as he mourns the loss of his best friend.


**The Perfect Ending**

Three people attended. Four if one counted the priest. But since he had to be paid to be there, and had to read from a book to find the words to sum up this man's life, he shouldn't be counted.

No one brought flowers; there were no chairs or unnecessary decorations, and it seemed somehow appropriate. The rawness of it all; this wasn't a celebration, it was funeral, and by building this ceremony in such a bare fashion, it didn't seem as unnatural to be lowering a friend into a dug out space of earth.

Showing little pity or apathy, the priest slapped his bible shut and two unaccounted for men in grey jumpsuits moved forwards, shovels hoisted up on their shoulders. One smacked his gum, blew a bubble, allowed it to pop loudly, and looked around awkwardly. "Are you guys done here?" he asked emotionlessly.

A short, quiet man standing back a few feet from the scene snapped his head up and glared at them both. He was wearing a black suit, the sun was beating down mercilessly, and his best friend couldn't be by his side because his body was locked inside a casket; his mood left no room for ignorant, unfeeling grave diggers. "No," the man muttered harshly, but so quietly that he might as well not have said it at all.

The men put down their shovels and began to lower the mahogany box anyway.

He would remember that sound until the day he died. The cranks squeaked under the weight due to age. It was not the ideal requiem, but that's what he'd remember it as.

When he could no longer see the top of the casket, he moved past two women and kneeled next to the plot. His fingers curled around the edge of the earth and his mouth moved silently as he repeated what he remembered of the Jewish pray said at his grandmother's funeral. A well loved 8mm camera sat next to him on the grass, and his unsteady hand picked it up after a moment. Drawing it to his face, he gazed into the plot through the lens. "Close on Roger, who has finally said goodbye. Live fast, die young. Say hello to Angel, Collins, and Mimi for me," whispered the man. One of the women standing behind him let escape a single sob. Turning the camera around to himself, the man focused it again and spoke in a steadier voice, "Pan to Mark, who's finally saying goodbye as well." He swirled the camera around the cemetery. The last shot was of a stranger's tombstone before he shut it off.

"Mark..." drew out the woman behind him, sadly.

He ignored her pity and concern, focusing his efforts on releasing the film from the camera. Shoving the reel into his jacket pocket, he clutched the 8mm to his chest. He had nothing to hide from anymore; life, which this black box had created such a perfect escape from, was over. With closed eyes, Mark dropped the camera in the plot along side his best friend, knowing he might as well say goodbye to everything he loved all at once.

He couldn't stand dragging it out anymore. Years had come and gone, and with each one he'd had to watch his friends, the ones he had loved, leave him to rot in this God forsaken place all alone.

Too many funerals. Too many deaths. Too much pain for him to face alone; he wouldn't be able to pick himself up after this one. This was the last one.

"Mark..." the voice cooed again.

He pushed himself up from the ground, brushing his dirty palms against his dirty borrowed dress pants. Turning around to face the voice, Mark wasn't sure of the best expression to plaster across his features when facing his ex-girlfriend.

She was calling his name to comfort him in the only way she knew how, but now he realized that nothing she could say would ever comfort him. She could declare she had decided lesbianism wasn't for her and she wanted him back, and he would not flinch, because the last of his longing for her was gone. His fixation with winning back her heart had not weathered the years as nicely as he had once expected; he had always been convinced she was the love of his life, and nothing would change that. But death had changed that. Loss had changed that. Each new funeral he dragged himself to, he had to watch her fall into the arms of another woman as she dissolved into tears, and Mark had finally realized she would never be anything more to him than an ex-girlfriend. He was through with the chase.

"Maureen..." he said, mirroring her tone.

His hands slipped into his pockets and his eyes were compelled to look up. Where were the clouds? The rain? His eyes squinted in the midmorning sunlight and he wondered how the sky could be anything but grey on a day like this. Had Life deemed Roger's life too insignificant to humor Mark's mood with a little bit of gloomy weather? Maybe if Roger hadn't slipped away in July, the chances for that kind of goodbye would've greatly increased.

"Are you going to be okay?" Maureen asked gently, reaching out to give Mark's arm a little squeeze. The comforting gesture was, again, lost on the man. The comment provoked his eyes to drift from the sky, to his arm, to Maureen. They narrowed instinctively, but only for a moment, because that's all it took for Mark to realize he was too far gone to fight her.

No, he wouldn't be okay. Nothing could be okay after this. He wanted to grip her shoulders tightly, shake her petite body with any strength he had left in his own, and scream. Scream that no, after loosing his best friend, he was far from okay; scream an array of obscenities; scream anything. He wanted her to know that he was broken in too many places now, and no amount of super glue or duct tape could fix him. He was an empty, cracked, shell. He had been smashed open, and his life had spilled out everywhere. Nothing could make him feel whole again, make him feel alive. But he had seen too many movies, gone to too many funerals, and knew how common the line was. Maureen didn't know what to say, and people who didn't know what to say, said that.

He couldn't fault her for expressing mock concern; she had always done that, for as long as he had known her. She was an actress, after all. Now it was his turn to act.

He took a step forward, reached out to clutch her upper arms, and stared at her with his dulling eyes. "Everything is fine. Everything will be okay," he said slowly, hoping she would somehow be reassured by those words. He pulled her body to his, wrapped his arms around her, and gave her a quick kiss on her temple. It was so out of character and unexpected by both parties that neither had much time to react before it was over.

When Mark's arms pulled away from her, Maureen's lover immediately slipped her hand into Maureen's; Mark saw their fingers lace. She had found something in her girlfriend she had never been able to find in Mark: love.

Mark's had been there, but it was the quiet kind. The kind he felt, but didn't know if the people he felt it for could feel it as well. She couldn't feel it. It hadn't been big enough, strong enough, or open enough for Maureen; but it had been there. It never would be again. Not for anybody.

Mark stuck his hand out to shake her girlfriend's free one. "Joanne, take care of her... and yourself." He tried not to make it sound as final as he meant it to be. "I think I'm just going to walk home, so... uh... bye," he said awkwardly, giving both women a small shrug and what he hoped was an encouraging smile. Though he knew he wouldn't be, he wanted them to believe he'd be okay.

Joanne and Maureen looked at each other, looked at Mark, and knew he wouldn't be okay. But if he thought he needed fresh air, if he needed to see life being lived all around him as he made his way back to an empty one, who were they to take that from him? The women nodded and watched him take off down the northern path before taking the southern one themselves. Mark stopped when he reached the cemetery's entrance and glanced back over his shoulder to see if Maureen and Joanne were still staring after him, fretfully; they weren't.

Mark looked down the sidewalk to his right and saw a young, high spirited girl bobbing her head to unheard music while a panting pug pulled at his leash a few feet ahead of her. He had to blink twice and squint to convince himself it wasn't Mimi. Mimi was behind him, six feet under ground, and had been for a year now.

Mark looked down the sidewalk to his left and saw a cluster of boy who couldn't have been older than thirteen. Their pants were hanging off their hips, their hats were all on backwards, and their arms were crossed along their chests in some sad attempt to look tough. Sad because they did look tough, and Mark didn't want them to. They deserved innocence. With cigarettes dangling on their lips, their eyes, which were no more than slits, looked around purposefully. They were looking for something more than nicotine.

Mark should've had the strength to walk up to those boys, pull up their pants, swing their hats around, and tell them to go home if they didn't want their future to be in the cemetery next to his best friend. But knowing they wouldn't listen discouraged him from trying. They'd blow him off, tell him to mind his own fucking business, and probably throw some "old man" comment in there as well.

He couldn't blame them.

Roger had given no heed to the various counselors and guest speakers they'd seen growing up. In retrospective, Roger always said he wished he had listened. Inside, though, he knew it was something he had to learn on his own, just like these kids would. And though Mark had counted only 30 candles on his last birthday cake, perhaps he was an old man.

Or an old soul at least.

His body was relatively young still, but he sometimes felt as if his back was bent more than it should be and his shoulders were almost always hunched over unattractively. The lines on his face told the story of someone who had lived an unrealized dream and had watched it die. They told of someone who had lost too much, and only then realized he had so much to lose; someone who had grown up too late, because he preferred the world through a lens and refused to live in it.

His eyes were clouded with the things he'd seen, things he'd recorded and documented, and the truths he had come to fear. How life was just a fucked up game of survival, and as he had always been in gym class, he had been picked last. How there are travesties thicker than blood and thicker than friendship because death can destroy anything. How, at the end of the day, not everyone is as alone as they feel; but to those who truly are, it's not easy to find a reason to wake up in the morning.

His thick, black frames were slipping down his nose, but he wouldn't push them back up. He was defeated. Finally, it was enough. Finally, it was too much, and his tattered body was going to push itself to whatever edge it could manage.

So he ran.

He ran down the sidewalk to his right, away from the youth he couldn't save, past the girl he'd never know, and towards a life he no longer lived.

Short, labored breaths were being pushed from his mouth, sweat poured down his brow, and a sharp pain teased his side; proving just how unfit Mark was for running. He didn't run, he hid. This wasn't him anymore.

The feet connected to the legs that were connected to the body he no longer owned traveled five city blocks, rounded the necessarily corners, and only came to rest when they reached a familiar stoop. A beaten, scuffed up, trash ridden stoop he'd have to cross if he was really going to do this.

His eyes burned as beads of sweat slipped down into them, and the tears that ensued could not be distinguished as sorrow, pain, or irritation. His hands found his hips, and as his breathing found a steady pattern, one not so audible, Mark slid a key into the lock, with a little difficulty, and moved through the threshold.

A movement that had been an adopted instinct for so long now seemed much too foreign. The four flights of stairs up to his loft had never taken him so long. He couldn't push further, or run faster anymore. The air in the building was choking him and reminding him that this was now HIS loft, not THEIR loft.

After fiddling with a few keys (his mind couldn't comprehend which was the one to the loft and which one he had found on the street once, belonging to an abandoned storage space) and giving the steel door a few knocks with his shoulder, it opened, revealing... nothing. Nothing of consequence, anyway. He was greeted with a lopsided couch, three plastic porch chairs (all of which wobbled slightly, but one even more than the others), and a sturdy table. He was greeted with the foul smell of the city wafting through the open windows and a pitiful wire fan trying to battle the blistering heat.

More obvious than anything, though, was the silence of it all.

There was a treasured Fender guitar propped up in the far corner, but a thin layer of dust had dulled its shine; its music was dying, only kept alive in the weak undertones of Mark's memory. But that was fading too. His memories weren't as detailed as before. Short, cut up, blurry. That's what his films had been for, to ensure he would never forget a single moment worth remembering. He didn't want to forget the past; he wanted to forget the present. But without a camera to play them on, the reels of better times were as worthless as his fleeting memories of them.

Perhaps it was better this way. This way nostalgia couldn't eat away at his sanity. In fact, maybe he had completely lost the point of filmmaking when he decided to use it as a tool to save the past; maybe the past wasn't meant to be saved.

"Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire," he muttered, pulling from obscurity the beginnings of a Robert Frost poem he remembered from years ago. The past was ready to be burnt to the ground. He was finally going to purge the years and years of life he had stored away in boxes in his bedroom; he couldn't see a reason not to. How flammable were film and canisters, anyway? He had an empty trash can and some fuel oil and was going to find out.

There were more boxes than he remembered, but he dutifully dragged them all into the front room nonetheless. He kneeled beside the first one and dug out a reel. There were a few lines written on the canister in his unruly scrawl. "Roger's 24th Birthday", "Tattoo Parlor", "Maureen in Washington Square Park", and "First Christmas in Loft" reminded him that things hadn't always been this way, so full of death and grieving. How had he forgotten that? He had forgotten that because _all he had known_ for the past three years was death and grieving, pain and loss. He hadn't been able to look past that, it'd been too strong, too overpowering.

Mark opened the canister and drew out a bit of film, holding it up to the flickering light overhead to examine it more closely. He could roughly make out Roger perched on the kitchen table with his Fender... April was standing behind him. It was the first shot on the reel. It'd be the first to burn. He paused, his hand poised to drop the memory into the unlit fire.

Something snapped.

This was what it was like to be alone, he realized. Truly alone. Bottom of the barrel. Cold, numb, and empty. What he had once perceived to be loneliness meant nothing now, because it was nothing like this. This was being able to smell Roger's cologne when it hadn't been sprayed in weeks. This was hearing Roger strumming his guitar, though it lay quiet in the corner. This was knowing that Roger wasn't going to stumble in the door high at four am, or come crashing back in after a fight with Mimi. This was permanent. Roger would never come back home, he would never make this go away. He could still cause pain--his memory could cause pain--but he'd never be around to receive it himself. This was the kind of pain people can't describe, but still try to, because they think that if they can put it into words, they will finally be able understand it and fix it. But this kind of pain can only be fixed by one thing, and it was the loss of that one thing that brought it about in the first place.

_Fuck Roger. Fuck him for leaving. Fuck him for not being strong enough to fight and stay with me_, Mark thought in a fit of despair.

He threw the film into the trashcan, emptied half of the fuel can's contents over it, and lit a match. The flames grew quickly, and Mark tossed more canisters in.

Faster. His eyes glazed over. Die. Dead. Everything. This was the end of any proof that they had ever even existed. There wasn't any proof of his own existence to destroy. He was just a though; a figment of someone's imagination; a ghost. Or he might as well have been. The only two things to ever define him--his camera and his friends--were now lost. The kind of lost someone says instinctively even though he knows they're not really lost, they're gone. Was it possible to redefine oneself after such devastation? Did this mean he had no sense of self anymore? Mark grabbed another reel of film and chucked it into the fire. It crackled and he stumbled back when the flames flew up dangerously close to his face.

He was sweating again.

He threw his glasses off his face and listened as they hit the floor with a thud. With closed eyes, Mark pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed heavily.

Pause.

He could hear running water. It wasn't uncommon to hear noises; the building was old and thin and sound traveled easily, but this was close. It was coming from the bathroom. Mark didn't want to go in there, and if he could've stopped his feet from moving, he would have. But his feet moved and his teeth grinded and his eyes welled up and he couldn't stop any of it. And when he stood in front of the doorframe, he fell to his knees and gasped for air because it was all too much. Because too many images came flooding back. They played like a film he couldn't burn.

_Running water. A thud. Running feet. A gasp. Roger's body, thin, pale and covered in sores sprawled across the bottom of the bathtub. Shaking. Shaking. Screaming. Wake-up. Wake-up! It's over._

His head felt too heavy to hold up so he lifted only his eyes. He let them settle on the porcelain tub two feet in front of him. He reasoned himself into believing what he was seeing was something that would fade with time. But reason had no place here. The cold, limp, lifeless arm dangling over the edge of the bathtub proved that. It was too vivid to be a memory, but it couldn't be real. There was no rational explanation, and Mark realized just how little rationality there actually was in his life.

Roger had died here, in this very bathroom, in this very bathtub, and the fact that Mark could see his body as clear as if it were actually there should've unnerved him more than it did. Was this how it felt to go mad? Or was this a natural reaction to death? He had no one to ask. He just had to accept what he was seeing and find some kind of normalcy in it.

Crawling across the bathroom floor on all fours, his breathing uneven and shallow, Mark needed to see just how real this could get. He got to the edge and placed both hands on the tub on either side of tragically placed arm. Tears were stinging the back of his throat. He didn't want them to come. He hadn't allowed himself a moment to cry yet; he told himself that he would, but this was not that moment. He hoped that blinking would calm his eyes, his throat, his heart; but as soon as his lids fluttered back open, he regretted ever closing them.

Roger was gone.

Physically, anyway. And that made Mark's need to cry even stronger.

He leaned back, sitting on his heels now, and placed his palms together, as if in prayer, and raised them so his index fingers were resting against his lips and the tips against his nose. His thumbs pushed up against his chin. He blinked again, but the act didn't bring the vision back. He wanted to tell himself that it was better that way, that he couldn't go on imaging that Roger was just passed out in the bathtub and would eventually wake up; but he knew that he wanted to hold onto that picture. It was selfish and it comforted him.

Crash.

Mark didn't want his attention to wander.

Crash.

He couldn't ignore it, though.

With a lot more effort than it had taken to squat down in the first place, Mark pushed himself up, straightened his legs, backed up two steps, and leaned his body back so he could stick his head past the doorframe. His eyes went wide and glazed over--flames danced across the glassy stare.

He'd made the mistake of forgetting.

He had wanted so desperately to destroy his memories before they destroyed him--to wipe the slate blank so he wouldn't have to know pain anymore--that he had forfeited all control over to the fire. He wanted the fire to save him from misery and attachment. He wanted to see the flames set him free, but he had forgotten to watch. And in his moment of weakness, when he had fallen at the feet of Roger's memory, the fire decided that his memories weren't enough. It was going to destroy everything.

Flames were spilling out over the trashcan and the lopsided couch, which was pushed close to fight off the usual cold, blazed brightly. The boxes of films he hadn't yet had the opportunity to discard crackled and hissed as well. The flames grew and teased the loft around them--the sturdy little table next to the couch, where the phone and a secondhand lamp stood nicely, was beginning to smoke and burn along the edges.

Mark could not move.

He couldn't reach the phone and doubted there was a fire extinguisher anywhere in loft--if there was, he wouldn't know where to look. His only options was to flee the building and watch it burn from the inside out. He would have to abandon all he had left of this life or go down with it in flames.

He pulled his shirt up over his nose in hopes of inhaling cleaner air that way--there was already so much smoke. Mark couldn't tell if his eyes were watering from the smoke, or the knowledge that he would never have the chance to give this place a proper goodbye. He couldn't stop the tears this time, though, whatever the cause, and was about to shut them and run for it, when he saw one of the boxes of film collapse.

Torched and burning canisters rolled along the floor. One spun to a stop at his feet and he quickly kicked the ruined film.

He realized too late the tragedy in doing so. All of this had started because he needed to push everything away--feeling, love, devotion, need--and it would end the same way.

The canister rolled shakily towards the fuel can Mark had set down a few feet away from trashcan. That had seemed like a smart place, out of harm's way. He shook his head disbelievingly and threw himself back into the bathroom just as the can ignited. Even with his eyes shut tightly, his hands clasped over his ears, and his body huddled in the corner where the bathtub met the wall, Mark realized how different it was to see explosions on film and to hear your life itself explode.

Cautiously, he raised his head and cranked it towards the door. He didn't need to look; he could feel it. He could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up and feel the heat soak through his dress jacket. But he stilled looked, because he had to see anything to really trust it, really believe it.

He was a filmmaker.

His eyes hurt as he stared at the flames, stealing more of his life than he should've allowed them to. He shouldn't have allowed them to claim anything, and it was sad how one mistake can ruin anything.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, allowing the tears in his eyes to finally roll down his cheeks. He knew and wouldn't deny that they weren't because of the smoke. "I'm sorry for trying to forget, for trying to erase you." His voice was louder. "I don't want to forget anymore!" His voice broke through the steady roar of the fire.

He didn't wonder if anyone would hear his cry because he didn't care.

His feet where facing the bathtub and his knees were brought up to his chest, and when he lifted his eyes to look ahead, he saw Roger's arm tangling limply over the side.

With an unblinking stare, Mark pulled himself up and crawled gently into the tub. He could feel Roger's body up against his. He pulled his best friend's arm back into the porcelain box, laced his fingers with his, and closed his eyes.


End file.
